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A crater’s scar on the landscape is the most recognizable remnant of a meteorite impact. But meteorites have left other, much smaller markers of their presence on the surface of the Earth: splash droplets called tektites.

After only six months in orbit about Mercury, a NASA spacecraft has collected measurements that have discredited most theories about how our solar system’s innermost planet formed. Data gathered by instruments on MESSENGER reveal that Mercury’s surface has Earth-like levels of potassium and an even higher sulfur abundance, evidence that is at odds with most theories for how the super-dense planet came to be.

Launched in August 2004, MESSENGER stands for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging. It entered orbit about Mercury—the first spacecraft to do so—in March of this year.

Some of these new findings, published in a set of seven Sciencepapers available online today, were first predicted in 2003 by Denton Ebel, curator in the Museum’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Conel Alexander, a researcher in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The two scientists recently published a separate paper highlighting their model in Planetary and Space Science.

On the first Wednesday of every month, the Museum hosts inquisitive minds for cocktails and conversation about the latest science topics at SciCafe. The popular after-hours series returns on October 5 with an evening devoted to scientific evidence about the nature of race and “racial” differences led by Museum Curators Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle, who recently co-authored a book on the subject.

The Nile crocodile, one of Egypt’s most famous icons, is in fact two distinct species, according to recent genetic analyses of mummified crocodiles from ancient Egyptian temples.

Evon Hekkala, an assistant professor at Fordham University, conducted a DNA analysis at the Museum’s Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics by extracting the DNA of 57 specimens—some of them mummies—from museums around the world and 123 modern crocodiles, which she then sequenced at the Sackler Institute.